[n3k5]

Is anyone here familiar with Matomo? I noticed the linked page attempts to run it before seeing it mentioned, because Ghostery blocked it.

It's a “Free software alternative to Google Analytics” “which can easily be configured to respect your visitors' privacy”[0] (emphasis mine). But can it be configured in a way so you can claim “without any tracking code”? I wonder whether the claim in the headline was supposed to be merely “no third-party tracking”. [Edited to add:] Waiiit a moment, is the intended meaning simply “no Google tracking code”? (I don't think the article addresses this anywhere; hope I didn't just miss something.)

Or maybe I'm supposed to know that “no tracking” is jargon for something like ”attempts to not store PII” in this industry? I doubt that it can be configured such that, for example, unique visitors are statistically estimated instead of counting unique IDs from tracking cookies — but I'm too lazy to research that in detail, so it would be interesting to hear from someone who knows more.

[0] https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo

[judge2020]

Well, the only thing you can do is attempt not to store PII and only pull very limited information from the browser, ideally just the utm tags, referrer, and maybe some available api feature flags (eg. say you want to roll out webauthn and want to figure out how many of your users' browsers have that capability). Unless you trust that the site has `access_logs off`, tracking can just be done by analyzing those access logs even for users with noscript.